A Quantified Method for Characterizing Waveform Distortion

Waveform distortion is a common phenomenon in electronic systems, which leads to system performance degradation. In order to characterize waveform distortion caused by harmonic, Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) is used. However, in many situations, the waveform distortion usually caused by much more factors, which cannot be characterized by THD. Therefore, waveform distortion factor (WDF) is proposed in this paper. As the development of THD, the effects of amplitude suppression, narrowband interference and noise interference are considered in WDF additionally. To make an illustration, the nonlinear characteristic of low noise amplifier (LNA) is analyzed using WDF.